A special interest program assembled by the Human Rights Campaign to promote homosexuality has been launched in the 91-school Minneapolis district, even as opponents are urging school officials to keep sexuality out of the social culture.

“The government should promote and encourage strong families,” said Austin R. Nimocks, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. “When school officials have to choose between protecting children in those families or furthering the homosexual agenda, the choice is obvious: protecting our children comes first.”

The issue is the “Welcoming Schools” program assembled by the HRC, which advocates for and promotes homosexuality.

District spokesman Ross Bennett told WND the program already has been launched in one school and was under consideration by the district’s curriculum committee for other uses.

He said he knew of one principal in one school who had requested help because of “bullying” that he believed was focused on sexual orientation issues, and the district considers the HRC promotional program another tool for teachers and administrators to use.

He said the district’s existing anti-bullying program could not be called inadequate, but “there’s always room for improvement.”

The ADF’s comments accompanied a legal memo to the district advising officials of the true intent of the HRC promotion.

“HRC says the program is designed to stop bullying, even though its true intent is to promote the homosexual agenda,” Nimocks said. “If HRC merely cared about bullying, they would simply endorse the school district’s vigorous ‘Bullying and Hazing Policy.’”

“According to its own statistics, HRC represents only 4.1 percent of American adults who identify themselves as homosexual, but it is attempting to implement its agenda on our children and the remaining 95.9 percent of American adults who don’t identify themselves as either ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” he said.

The promotional materials, the ADF said, can lead to a wide range of “practical and legal problems.”

“Especially within schools, bathrooms, locker rooms, and other intimate places will no longer be protected from members of the opposite sex once ‘gender identity’ becomes standard behavior for students,” the memo states. “From an enforcement standpoint, school officials would be unable to discern whether a boy who is using the girls’ restroom is a sexual predator, prankster, or one who sincerely believes that he is somehow a girl.”

According to published reports in Minnesota, the district is moving forward with the plan despite opposition from parents, who complained the agenda places too much emphasis on teaching about homosexual and other lifestyle choices, and includes too little about racial and religious diversity “and that it undermines parental authority by causing confusion in children.”

Bill Green, the Minneapolis school superintendent

Supt. Bill Green, however, in a newspaper, endorsed the plan. His office declined to allow WND to ask him any questions, referring all inquiries instead to Bennett.

WND previously has reported on a nationwide campaign to have parents keep their children home from schools when the institutions promote the pro-homosexual “Day of Silence” activist event annually.

The MinnPost.com website reported it was the principal at Hale School in the district, Bob Brancale, who demanded the program. He said there’s a need for an anti-bullying program that includes homosexual issues and he wanted the program installed and his teachers trained.

The principal said there were 240 behavioral referrals this school year and 60 were for bullying, including about half involving “some form of gay slurs,” the report said.

The school board said it left curriculum matters to its school managers.

But the Alliance Defense Fund said the proposal will make problems.

“The ‘Welcoming Schools’ project incorporates within itself two incorrect and dangerous assumptions – (a) that one’s sex is a mental decision and not a biological fact, and (b) that individuals are born with an immutable ‘sexual orientation,’ including children as young as five-years-old having normal same-sex attractions.”

“It is clear that the goal of HRC is to implement an educational program to indoctrinate young children with social viewpoints that are extremely controversial, out of the mainstream, and rely on unproven scientific theory that runs counter to American cultural and scholastic interests,” the ADF advisory said.

“The indoctrination of children with HRC’s anti-religion political agenda will present serious practical and legal problems, especially [as] adults are charged with the safety and security of other people’s children.”

Among other issues, the ADF said, presenting such indoctrination in class would violate the district’s own policy addressing teaching controversial material.

Further complicating the issue would be the program’s targeting children ages 5-7 with a lesson “that sex is an irrelevant biological inconvenience.”

“In fact … HRC embraces the notion that a person can identify as neither male nor female, but instead ‘intersexual,’” the ADF said.

The promotional material’s use of “gender identity” is just an attempt to “socially normalize behavior flowing from a known and recognized mental illness (Gender Identity Disorder),” the ADF said.

“As a society, if we were to begin ignoring the needs of those inflicted with schizophrenia, denying them treatment, care, medication, and counseling, the consequences would be devastating. The turning of a blind eye to GID is no less destructive,” the letter said.

On a practical level, schools no longer would be able to segregate boys and girls for restroom needs, locker room facilities and other intimate situations once “gender identity” is fully embraced, the ADF said.

“By choosing to embrace HRC’s political agenda, school administrators would be forced to defer to the perceived or designated sex of each individual, without regard to their biological reality,” the group said. Working under such a belief system, “there is no circumstance under which a teacher or school administrator would know whether to object to any given individual’s usage of the boys or girls restroom.”

“Moreover, all students possess privacy rights, even within their school…,” the group said. “The law protects students … in refraining from having their bodies exposed to members of the opposite sex. … There exists no compelling interest that justifies your endangering the health, welfare, and safety of … students in order to acquiesce to a wayward and misguided political agenda.”

The legal advisory also noted the HRC program lacks scientific support and usurps parental rights.

“The ‘Welcoming Schools’ project is sex-based education – nothing more,” the ADF said. “Allowing the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy and political organization to dictate elementary school curriculum will pique the curious and inquisitive minds of the school district’s children, leading to disastrous consequences.”

One of those consequences, according to ADF, would be an open door to damage claims.

“Since everyone arguably possesses some semblance of ‘sexual orientation,’ nothing will prevent students from making various or inconsistent claims…” ADF said, which could not be defended because the basis for such claims woudl be a perceived sexual orientation.